Ang lubags mo

We traveled 7,525 miles over 20 hours, two airlines, four airports, and one pair of underwear.

 To drink Fundador brandy. Loads and loads of Fundador brandy.  

And, damn, that trip was worth giving up half my liver for. 

But I am getting ahead of myself. And I’m sure my three female readers don’t want to read about the benefits of wearing day-old underwear (because I am reserving that five-part column for the holidays). 

For those of you who are drawn to this column like an accident along the South Super Highway, several months ago I interviewed the members of Team Tomador, kumpares that collectively abandoned common sense and joined the ridiculously difficult Fundador Brotherhood Challenge. The physical and emotional challenges they faced in the challenge were more nerve-wracking than your girlfriend on PMS, but the challenges were simply another notch in the crotch for these men whose idea of fun is waking up when girlie bars are just about winding down to train for a 25k marathon. These were kumpares who enjoyed daylong sun-beaten treks along mountain ranges and camping out in areas where they are stuck between the operatic exchange of military and NPA gunfire. These were kumpares who didn’t mind sucking away at snake venom from the pink parts of one of their Tomador brethren for the right compensation (well, at least this was true for the one wielding a law degree). In short, this was a certifiably depraved barkada. And it is only men who have sunk to this level of institutional depravity that will have the gonads to win a trip to Jerez, Spain — home of Fundador Brandy. These are the men whom I fondly call the Lucky Bastards Going to Spain (LuBaGS). 

But these men weren’t even the luckiest bastardos who were being whisked away to Jerez to chug their physiques away. There was another group of kumpares whose only physical challenge for the AXN Fundador Brotherhood Challenge involved pumping out text messages to say who they thought would be the winning team.  These kumpares have no name for their group but since they were the “home partners” of Team Tomador, I have dubbed them Team Couch Potato. When Team Couch Potato’s manoks won the Challenge, the “home” team was also sent packing to Jerez, Spain. This barkada are the luckier LuBaGS.

But the most swerte of them all was the bastardo who didn’t have to engage in any cardiovascular torture with his kumpares. Nor did this bastardo have to twiddle out text messages to vote for his favorite team. Hell, he didn’t even have to suck away at any snake venom (unless offered a lucrative movie deal). The only thing he had to do was forsake dignity, surgically attach himself to the leg of the challenge’s organizer, and offer several body parts for abuse in exchange for an article on Jerez that would appeal to his three female readers. And the threat of body parts worked because I was the luckiest LuBaGS of them all! Ha, ha, ha… dignity is so overrated. The only downer about the whole trip was that they couldn’t spare an extra ticket for my yaya. 

Ah, España.  I have always dreamed of visiting Spain, the home of my theoretical ancestors. In fact, if you squint really hard enough, you will see how my espasol white skin proudly displays traces of my Spanish heritage. Although I might easily blend into the crowd with my chemically whitened skin, I also wanted to sound more native.  Unfortunately, the only Spanish I knew, aside from those lovely-sounding words the coño kids would utter while they swirled my head in the toilet bowl during high school recess, was whatever I learned from Dora the Explorer. Unfortunately, Dora never told me that to speak in a truly Castilian fashion, I would have to modify my speech patterns and replace the sound of the letter “s” with the “th” sound. Apparently, you can sound this way by simulating a lisp, losing a couple of front teeth or by pretending to talk like Sylvester the Cat. So a couple of weeks before I left, I started my tongue exercises at home with simple words like “Thpain.” “Jereth.”  “Thuthmariothep.” “ Thufferin’ thuccotash.”

After extensive tongue work, I experimented with my newly minted accent when we finally got to the motherland. The first thing my fellow LuBaGS and I were on the lookout for at the Jerez airport, aside from Penelope Cruz, was a money-changing station. I clambered over to the moneychanger and offered up my one-dollar bill.  “Como ethta mucha buena manang thenora!” I proclaimed with a wink-wink and a half-smile. “Barya?” I asked. 

The female teller, a woman in her mid-fifties who wore a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and was a firm believer that there is no such thing as too much lipstick, looked at me and sneered, “Que?” 

“Um, barya manang tindera?” I clarified, rubbing the dollar between my index finger and my thumb.

She edged closer to her glass window.

 “Cambio, Señor?”

Wow, I thought. I discreetly bobbed my head to see if it was that obvious. This was quite embarrassing. Although I admit that the poor circulation of my legs during the flight could have caused some blood clotting.

“Ethte?”

“Cambio!” she exclaimed shrugging her shoulders.

Okay, wit was that bad. But what could I do? I was wearing the same pair of underwear for the past 24 hours (and counting). So I reached nimbly into the crook of my pants to perform some quick calisthenics. But when the moneychanger saw me reaching down into my nether regions, she burst into a litany of cuss words that sounded exactly how the coño kids used to talk in high school.  After my adjustment, a loud buzz rang out and in a few seconds I had the chance to appreciate the full force of the Spanish gwardia sibil’s anti-terrorist unit. Apparently the word cambio was not used properly when it was transported to the Philippine Islands. The word was probably first used here by DOMs.   

After they had confiscated my underwear and I was released from police custody, the Fundador staff handed out a travel kit that contained a complimentary bottle of Fundador Solera, a map of historical landmarks, a few postcards and two small yellow pompoms. I knew what to do with everything else in the kit, but was unsure as to the purpose of the pompoms. Were we supposed to use them as a fashion accessory? Were we supposed to wear them to differentiate us from the other traveling bunch of nine jaywalking Asian tourists in Jerez whose only knowledge of Spanish was their last names? I wasn’t too sure. Or maybe, just maybe, these pompoms were merely a prelude to the type of Ibiza-style partying that we would enjoy in the brandy capital of world. Maybe when we got out of the airport, we would be hailed by pompom-wielding cheerleaders dressed in the flimsiest of Flamenco outfits who would usher us into the Fundador party bus and welcome us to Jerez by generously showering us in brandy. And the organizers did say that during our last night in Jerez that we would be visiting the actual House of Domecq. Maybe this place was something like the Playboy mansion, but with English translators!

Instead, we were welcomed by a dour, hunched man named Esteban who sported a paunch and a three o’clock shadow and drove a bus called Selma (really). There were no cheerleaders. There were no brandy showers. And he wasn’t even wearing a wearing a flamenco outfit.  

After the LuBaGS and I spent an entertaining but ultimately futile evening trying to convince Esteban to dress in a flamenco outfit, he reluctantly drove us to the Domecq winery, a thousand-hectare expanse of manicured vineyards that stretched out almost into the horizon. We were welcomed to the estate by Don Beltran Domecq, the ambassador-at-large of the House of Domecq, makers of Fundador  — the brandy that has brought together many a barkada by leaving them in happily drunken stupors. Don Beltran was the epitome of Old World gentlemanliness. Dapper and well-dressed, he moved with a studied elegance and spoke in impeccable grammar-school English.  He was one of those right and proper men who still stuffed a panyo into his breast pocket and you knew it truly belonged there. And if you forgot any rules of etiquette or decent courtesy, the Don would also be the same person who would not hesitate to flog you for your indiscretion. But in a most polite manner.

In essence, Don Beltran is the type of man whom metrosexuals develop a man-crush over. And this was the type of man that all genteel men aspire to be. And you could be just like the Don, too, if you were white, European, well-educated, white, European, and the director of the founders of the House of Domecq. I believed that I could aspire to be this type of man. After all, I am espasol white.  

Before we took the grand tour of the Domecq vineyard, the Don invited us to partake of a traditional Jerezian breakfast. As a vegetarian, I eagerly anticipated a healthy countryside breakfast, which I thought would be filled with Spanish bread (what, walang Spanish bread sa Spain!?), cheese and tomato omelets, fresh fruits, and fresh cow’s milk. Don Beltran led us to the buffet table where he demonstrated how to prepare the breakfast. He took out a toasted piece of bread that resembled pita and drizzled it generously with olive oil. As he lathered up the bread in oil, my mouth started to water imagining how I would stack the bread with freshly picked tomatoes, cheese, scrambled eggs and a dash of pepper. But then the waiters brought out the breakfast’s pièce de résistance: several bowls of heaping pork fat. And you had a choice! You could get regular brown-colored pork fat or orange-colored pork fat with puréed chili peppers. That morning, I would be sticking to bread, olive oil and maybe some of the grape leaves I could pick from the vineyard. As I heard the joints of my fellow LuBaGS creaking while they devoured the processed lard, I wasn’t sure if any of them would survive breakfast.

However, maybe there was a purpose behind this high-protein meal.  Either this meal would be used to demonstrate the state-of-the-art cardiology services of Jerez hospital or this was meant to be an interactive tour where we would be to take part in vineyard labor such as grape-picking, yolk-pulling, or udder-squeezing (hey, there were some cows in the vineyard). 

Before the pork fat could permanently clog any blood vessels to the brain among the other LuBaGS, Don Beltran gave us a little geography lesson. “Jerez (remember gentlemen, the lithp, the lithp — RJ) de la Frontera is a municipality found in the province of Cadiz in the autonomous community of Andalusia in the southernmost portion of the Spanish peninsula.” He pointed out the province on a Renaissance-era map of Spain. “Cadiz is the oldest city in Western Europe founded some 3,100 years ago. This area of the Mediterranean was invaded by waves of civilizations. Among the first civilizations here were the Phoenicians back in 1000 BC who traded goods along the Mediterranean.  The Phoenicians came here and introduced the vineyards. So we introduced wine to this region almost 3,000 years ago. That’s why I mentioned that what we produce here is the most civilized of all alcoholic beverages.” 

“The Sherry district zone is called by several names — Jerez or Xeres or Sherry. This is almost the same name given to the area by the Phoenicians who called it Xeres. Then in 400 BC the Romans took over this region and called it Jerez. When the Moors invaded, it was called Xerix or Sherrich in 611 BC. But since the English are so bad at languages, they called it Sherry.” Don Beltran smirked. “So sherry is the worst name among all three, but it is interesting and unfortunate that we have to call it by all these three names.”  

“Yes, Don, them English are such bad peoples.” I tried to impress the gentleman with my rudimentary world knowledge hoping that he would adopt me and brainwash me in the ways of gentlemanliness.  “They eat kidney pie, they have bad teeth and they spell words with an extra letter u.”  

“I’m half-English,” Don Beltran remarked.

I gulped. “But your teeth aren’t, um, that bad, Thenor Beltran,” I said, laway spraying from my mouth.  

He took his panyo from his pocket and patted his nose. “And why are you spitting at me?

“I’m not thpitting, I am trying to talk with a Thpanish accent.”

Don Beltran politely signaled to the driver of our bus. “Esteban, please take out the horse whip.”

So I bent over and prepared for my first gentlemanly flogging from the good Don. Before this tour was done, I would be a gentleman before I knew it.

* * *

Next column: Ang LuBaGS mo part dos: Going Jeretic in the Vineyards. For comments, suggestions, or blah blah blah, please text PM POGI <message> to 2948 for Globe, Smart and Sun subscribers. Or please e-mail ledesma.rj@gmail.com.